Industry leaders in the retail chain have robotic process automation and machine learning to gain a competitive edge, while many small and medium size retailers rely on manual processes to manage business processes . As businesses grow, traditional interactions can become cumbersome and fail to meet the needs of a modern organization. Implementing process automation solutions as a digital transformation effort improves productivity through workflow automation.

Lighthouse Integrations was approached by a chain of retail stores that wanted to improve the quality of communications and transactions among different departments and increase the security of information and document exchange. The negative impact of common issues in their business processes such as slow orders, human errors, and time-consuming operations in the supply chain had greatly affected customer satisfaction and ultimately disrupted the entire business.

They also wanted to support the strategic defined goals of the organization, which included opening new branches in various cities in British Columbia, Canada.

Our team faced several challenges during this project, such as identifying internal policy, current tools, systems, modeling the entire business’ processes, process mining to detect the repetitive tasks, and increase compliance with industry specific standards.

We worked on choosing the right process automation system and change management process and executed tasks such as training employees, navigate systems, implementation, support, and more to reach improved productivity.

We were able to overcome these challenges and implement a solution that met the company’s needs.

We began by defined goals and strategies and identifying the main areas that needed improvement. This included process automation tools to facilitate the processes of employee onboarding, Leave and attendance data collection process, payroll data management, as well as financial reporting and inventory management measures.

To support these main business process, we chose the following tools:

• Collaboration tools: Microsoft Office 365 Business Standard
• Security monitoring: Sophos Endpoint XDR with Managed Detection and Response anti-malware and cybersecurity with 24/7 SOC monitoring
• Cloud storage: MS 365 OneDrive, with Datto Microsoft Tenant backup
• ERP solution: Microsoft Dynamics Enterprise

By implementing these tools, the store experienced several key benefits, including:

• Improved performance: The retail company experienced a significant improvement in communication and collaboration between branches, leading to faster decision-making that affects customers and reducing human errors in manual processing.
• Increased customer satisfaction: The implementation of these solutions helped to increase customer satisfaction by providing better service and faster response time and overall customer experience.
• Cost reductions: Automating processes in specific tasks that are important such as inventory management and sales tracking reduces costs in time-consuming tasks that are repetitive.
• Valuable insights: Data collection for both structured and unstructured data can lead to improved day-to-day operations and better decision-making.
• Operational excellence: Automating routine tasks and high volume tasks helped the company to save valuable time and fewer errors in specific processes such as purchase orders.
• Industry leader: These tools helped the company to streamline its operations and try to become an industry leader by implementing rule-based systems for multiple steps tasks.

Thanks to our work, this multi-location retail business is now able to better serve its customers, support its strategic goals, support the store staff multiple tasks, and automate business processes.